


The Penitent

by paraparadigm



Series: Recipes for Disaster [4]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Mages and Templars, No Smut, Religious Themes, Tranquility, just smutty ideation, sociopolitical meditation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:06:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27176302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraparadigm/pseuds/paraparadigm
Summary: Delrin Barris, freshly appointed as the Herald's Commander in lieu of Cullen, reflects on the vicissitudes of fate.Rated E for some dark sexual themes and language, but it's more fluffy angst than anything else. Loosely based on Evie from the Reluctant Alchemist, though this pairing and the events that led up to this are not canon for that story (at least for now).
Relationships: Delrin Barris/Female Inquisitor
Series: Recipes for Disaster [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1200565
Comments: 8
Kudos: 11





	The Penitent

**Author's Note:**

> CW: there is some dark sexual ideation in there, please read accordingly.

The waning sun filtered through the cracked glass of the South Tower window, dusting the inside of the former Lord Seeker’s quarters with rosegold light. 

He stood, as he had done often for the last week, in front of the old, bog pine desk where she sat—his back straight, his sword hand resting on the hilt of the new blade she had gifted him — a badge of status for her new commander, a reward paid forward, and the weight of which made Barris feel ill-at-ease.

“My Lady Herald,” he said quietly, drawing her attention away from the scattered stacks of correspondence. She lifted her head and smiled and something inside Barris’s chest shook loose and unfurled, filling him to bursting with a strange, restless levity. It was sad, that smile, and sweet as frost apples, with dimples and just the nascent shadow of laugh lines around her eyes. 

He knew she was lovely, of course — he’d have to have been blind not to see it. The dark blue eyes under long, heavy lashes, the creamy skin of her cheeks and brow, the soft shape of her lips that curled upward at the corners even when she wasn’t smiling — though she was now. Her hair had grown out to a long umber curtain and she wore it down, loose and unadorned except for a small braid that held the fringe away from her face.

There was a reason Bann Trevelyan had made the choice he did, Barris thought, and it wasn’t solely because he was loath to risk staining his name with two mage offspring. Barris hadn’t forgotten his father’s lessons, such as they were. One mage sibling was an expected risk. An unfortunate accident to be stashed away in a Circle and not remembered except around Satinalia, perhaps, when small gifts and well-wishes might be passed with a trusted courier, or when a death in the family would send the messenger ravens on their way. Two mage daughters was political death. Bann Trevelyan must have known that his youngest child would grow into the sort of beauty he could expect to win him a dubious barter, the sort that would make some not overly scrupulous lordling disregard such inconsequential things as strangely monotone speech or whether his bride felt anything at all as he took her — too quickly and with no mind for her comfort — when the nuptials came. 

An heir was an heir, however bought.

The horrid thought was so sudden and so vivid Barris had to grind his teeth against it. And what if _he_ had been that lordling, hmm? By accident of birth the one chosen among his brothers to carry the line, and the estate? House Trevelyan was an old name, respectable. A good alliance. What would he have done had Evelyn been given to _him?_ Not _this_ Evelyn, not this strange, soft, fierce creature with shadows in her eyes and death at her fingertips, not the Herald who sealed the Breach and suffered at the hands of the Darkspawn magister and survived. Not this Evelyn to whom he owed a debt he would never be able to repay, though try he would. 

No, the other Evelyn, the one that her father had tried his best to craft, a beautiful bleak doll with nothing in her eyes safe for the hollow left by the sunburst brand on her brow. Would he have been that lordling to push her unceremoniously onto the sheets, the one to lift her dress as he freed himself, indifferent to that hollowness or perhaps even glad of it…

_Andraste have mercy, what am I thinking?!_

At that moment, he wanted to drive his sword through that version of himself, jealous of the other him beyond measure and repulsed even more, ready to leave himself bleeding on the floor of that ghostly, unformed bedchamber.

“Delrin? Are you all right? I am so sorry, I know you must be terribly tired, what with all the rebuilding, but I’m still struggling with the heraldry — it just won’t stick in my mind, and without the Ambassador I’m afraid I’ll get terribly confused and insult someone on accident, and...”

He forced himself to meet her gaze. Her smile had turned apologetic. She was not that Evelyn. She was Andraste’s Chosen. And he was not the man in his vision. Not the heir of House Barris. Only a Templar with no Order, and no orders — except for the ones he took upon himself at her behest.

But the thought of her legs bared was not so quick to leave him and Barris dropped his gaze to the floor, his fingers curling tight around the hilt of his weapon. “I…” _Maker guide me, for I am unworthy_ , he thought, desperate now. “I am at your service, Your Worship.”

She made a small noise, neither chuckle nor sigh but something in between, bird-like and soft as a feather. “Delrin, please, just… Evie. My mind is a muddled mess at the best of times, and this ‘Your Worship’ business… It’s like there’s me, and there’s this thing separate from me called ‘my worship,’ and I’m not entirely sure what it’s doing, but it’s most definitely not worshipping anything that everyone else is, and it’s standing in the room and judging me quietly and telling me that the only thing I can hope for is the pyre...:”

Barris looked up sharply, the protest crushing his chest and stealing his breath. “No!” It flew off his lips like a prayer.

Again that smile — agonisingly open, self-deprecating amusement — the soft golden light a halo around her dark hair like the echo of some terrible blaze that would melt her away in the end, steal her from the world as irrevocably as the Order takes a lad’s childhood and bleeds it out with blue poison. 

And there, in that accursed chamber — the one from which the false Lord Commander issued his toxic orders — he finally saw it, simple and unequivocal as if in the stark focus of battle, the thing he had buried beneath his quiet reverence. It undid him so completely that he dropped his arms to his sides letting them hang there, useless, for the alternative terrified him. The alternative would be to walk across this chamber, around the bog pine desk. To close his hands around her shoulders. To feel her skin (down-soft and creamy under his calloused palms), to bend his head to hers, to fill his lungs with her scent (ambergris and rose and star anise), and to whisper promises he could not possibly keep. It was all he could imagine — all he allowed himself to imagine, and even that an unforgivable liberty. 

For the alternative to that… 

The alternative to that was the sort of templar he hadn’t become, by sheer accident of politicking—and the Circle mage she wasn’t. The Order was supposed to supersede all other forms of social standing, but it never did, did it? So he’d served where he’d be visible, and he had slayed demons and quelled unrests and settled minor disputes; trained kids who still cried for their mothers at night when the lyrium in their veins burned through them. He hadn’t been stashed away in a Circle to watch over the mages because his face—and his family connections—had been more expedient for the Order where they could be witnessed. And so, he had retained his shape, give or take. But whatever semblance of honor he’d managed to cling to over the years, it had a reverse side.

Barris swallowed. She was still looking at him, a shallow frown creasing her forehead, and his fingers itched to smooth it. But the floodgates had opened, and alongside the sparkling effervescence that filled his chest and thinned his breath—she was their Herald, and sometimes, when he prayed in the rundown chapel, it was her face Andraste took behind his closed eyelids—darker visions crowded in like unwelcome guests, sharp and shadowed and shameful. He tried to look elsewhere — anywhere else, really — but it did him no good. That other version of him, the one where he was given the power to decide the fate of those touched by magic, the man he did not become by little more than the random chance of birth— the other Delrin Barris, honed to a cynical, jaded edge by boredom, confinement, and the constant tension of the lurking disaster of possession — that Barris would not have harbored such lofty sentiments. He saw her through this stranger’s eyes, then — small and fragile, full of that softness not fully melted away by her travails, and all the more tantalizing for him to soothe his own sharp edges against. Soft, and yet dangerous, and that other Barris would have had something to prove. That other Barris would have noticed the round swell of her breasts beneath the austere robes. Perhaps he would have eyed them in open assessment. Perhaps he would have smiled in satisfaction at how well they filled his hands as he whirled her around, pressing her roughly against some dank dungeon wall. That other Barris — and oh, how he hated _that_ bastard too — would have trailed his fingers up the inside of her thigh as she breathed in fast shallow bursts. And then, finally, reaching under her smalls, he would have parted her softly, slowly, his fingers slick even if her expression remained as impassive and aloof as that of Andraste herself, coaxing her to open up, to make room for him…

_Oh, Maker preserve me, what is this madness..._

“Delrin? Did I say something to upset you?”

 _Get ahold of yourself, you wretch!_

He wasn’t that man either, in the end, and even those awful, vile things he hadn’t become had yet another underside, like a silver coin in the mud. In it, she’d never been born a mage at all, but an ordinary woman, neither remarkable nor breathtaking with that broken beauty of hers, but with all her sweetness retained, with a good family name and a simple path ahead. Perhaps they would have played together as children, sneaking away on misadventures, and getting scolded upon their return, grubby-faced and muddy-footed and giggling under the disapproving glares of the adults. Perhaps, they would have gotten to pick their paths, and settled on something similar—on scholarship over war, and they would have met in some dusty library at the University of Orlais, dropping books and getting tongue-tied. The world would have burned regardless, but they would have had each other—as lovers, or perhaps as friends and lifelong companions.

But they were not that either. Here she was, the Herald of Andraste, and she stood against the floodgates of calamity, small and fierce and a little bit awkward with it. And she had placed him at her side, to stave off the flood.

He cleared his throat. “No, Your Worship, I-”

She squinted at him in disapproval, and he cleared his throat again. “Evelyn,” he said tentatively.

“Evie,” she answered firmly, her nose wrinkling with it. “Whenever anyone calls me Evelyn, I hear aunt Lucile—she had this way of saying it, like it was something she was looking down her nose at. And she had a long nose, so there was a ways to go, as you can imagine…”

He felt his lips curl in a reluctant smile. “Evie, then.” With that, his ghosts receded. Whatever might have been, those paths would lay fallow. He was here, and he had a job to do. “So… The heraldry. If it’s any comfort at all, it took me forever to memorize some of the lesser houses. Got a sound thrashing or two for it, if we’re being honest.” At her frown, he grinned. “I don’t advocate the method, it wasn’t all that effective as far as I can tell, but I did end up coming up with a… mnemonic, of sorts. If my lady thinks it might be helpful…” He trailed off, hoping the heat creeping up his neck wouldn’t be too obvious in the waning light. Some of his mental tricks were more barracks humor than anything acceptable in polite company, let alone…

“You did?” She beamed at him. “Yes, please! Take a seat.”


End file.
